Office 365 is one of the most widely used solutions for email, document storage, and collaboration in large enterprises. The data in Office 365 is of critical importance to an organization. If this data is lost the company would lose revenue, and some parts of the organization would come to a total standstill. With the stakes being so high, it is essential to take precautionary measures ahead of time to secure data and be able to recover it if lost or damaged. Microsoft doesn’t provide native Office 36 backup and restore. Rather, they encourage third-party vendors to build solutions for this task. Having an Office 365 backup and recovery solution is essential in the case of a ransomware attack or accidental or even malicious deletion of data by an internal user.
There are numerous options available, but this article covers the top seven vendors offering Office 365 backup and recovery solutions. As you’ll see, there is a lot of overlap between the vendors, but also quite a bit that is unique to each of them.
Office 365 backup and recovery solutions
Nakivo Backup & Recovery for Office 365
Nakivo started as a backup and recovery service for VMs but has since expanded well beyond virtual machines to include cloud data, physical data stored on tapes, and recently, backup for Office 365 as well.
Nakivo Backup & Recovery for Office 365 service comes with all the bells and whistles of a mature solution. It gives admins the flexibility to back up all data or perform incremental backups. Backup entire mailboxes or individual mailbox folders. The same goes for recovering that data — it can be done in part or as a whole. Recovery can be done at the original location or another location where the data is needed.
To make operations easier for admins, Nakivo also enables regularly scheduled backups of data. Rounding off the list of features is eDiscovery, or the ability to find and use data for legal and compliance purposes. The best part about Nakivo is that the pricing is extremely competitive at just $0.75 per-user per-month.
Veeam
Veeam is a top-tier backup and recovery solution that was recently acquired by Insight Partners for a healthy $5 billion. Veeam offers flexibility with which data you need to backup, and where you’d like to store it. Additionally, Veeam’s backup proxies help quicken data transfers by taking the workload off the management server. Veeam also emphasizes hybrid backups. In this case, hybrid would mean other Microsoft services such as SharePoint.
While Veeam doesn’t reveal pricing on its website, it is around $1.20 per-user per-month. Complete with eDiscovery, Veeam is a backup and recovery vendor to consider in your shortlist.
Rubrik
Rubrik is the next vendor in our list of Office 365 backup and recovery solutions. It puts a focus on speed and simplicity of management. Rubrik boasts of a less than two-minute setup. While enterprises wouldn’t be in such a rush to get started fast, Rubrik does offer policy-based SLA enforcement, which would be appealing to enterprises.
Unlike the other vendors mentioned thus far, Rubrik uses Azure as the storage location for backups. This isn’t a good or bad thing, but it has a bearing on the decision you make. If you’re particular about backing up your data on-prem, Rubrik may not be the best fit. However, Azure is a reliable platform and can be economic as well. Rubrik doesn’t reveal pricing on its website.
SolarWinds Backup
SolarWinds Backup is another worthy solution for Office 365 backup. It provides all the standard options such as back up of only the changed data, encryption at rest and in transit, and more. It also comes with bells and whistles like WAN optimization to further reduce bandwidth usage. SolarWinds also backs up all customer data in its cloud. And SolarWinds also allows recovery of backups to bare metal without requiring that an OS be installed on the server. It is a top-tier enterprise backup solution for Office 365.
Acronis
Acronis specializes in data backup and recovery for on-prem and virtual machines, and cloud applications. Acronis works cloud-to-cloud and doesn’t require an agent to be installed on desktops. Acronis stores the backed-up data in its own datacenters.
Pricing is by numbers of user accounts to be backed up. Acronis offers two pricing tiers. The lower tier offers vanilla backup and recovery while the higher tier has a couple of bells and whistles like sharing storage between multiple users to save on costs, deduplication of data to save on costs, backup to tape, and other added features. Depending on the options you choose, pricing is anywhere from $169 to $299 per year for five seats.
Druva
Druva’s mantra is that they protect the data of SaaS apps using a SaaS app itself. The benefits of this are scalability and cloud-to-cloud data transfer. This eases the management of operations. Druva also provides backup for data centers, endpoints, and SaaS applications like Office 365, Salesforce, and Slack.
Druva offers centralized control of backups and incremental recovery, which they call federation search. They use metadata to classify pieces of data that can be backed up with precision. They include eDiscovery for compliance and even have options to automate the process.
Druva doesn’t reveal pricing publicly but has three tiers — Enterprise, Elite, and Elite plus. The Enterprise plan doesn’t offer eDiscovery, but the other two do. Recently, with the spread of coronavirus, Druva has announced six months of Office 365 protection free of charge. This is a great way to ensure compliance and security during a time when data is being accessed from unsecure locations and devices.
Backupify
Backupify is owned by Datto, a platform that offers services provided by its MSP partners. Backupify has a very focused offering, providing backup and recovery for Office 365 and GSuite. It doesn’t provide an on-premise backup solution and instead focuses on cloud-to-cloud backup. Backupify performs automated backup of Office 365, Exchange Online, SharePoint, and OneDrive three times a day.
Backupify follows a price-per-user model starting at $3 per-user per-month. It goes up to $990 per-domain per-month which includes 1TB of storage. When a user is removed from your Office 365 license, Backupify enables you to store their data cost-effectively over the long term. A simple and straightforward solution, Backupify has all you need for Office 365 in a convenient package.
Code Two
Unlike the other vendors listed here that specialize in backup and recovery, Code Two is more horizontally spread, providing services like email signatures and migration to Office 365. Code Two also provides backup for Office 365 data.
Also, unlike the others in this list, Code Two performs backup via a desktop application. They also feature incremental backups, and backup complementary Microsoft services like SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange Online. In terms of backup location, they allow you to choose between the cloud or on-prem. Code Two also handles automatic archiving of old data which is a great feature to optimize the size of data stored.
In terms of pricing, Code Two follows a licensing model for its software. Pricing starts at $147 for 10 users per year and gets discounted as you increase the number of user accounts to be backed up.
Office 365 backup and recovery solutions: Get one, be safe
There are numerous options for Office 365 backup and recovery. This is a good thing considering the importance of having this data backed up. As cloud applications drive the cost of data storage down, the cost of backing up this data is equally driven down thanks to the innovation being driven by these organizations. Whether you’d like to store data on-premises or in the cloud, for 10 users or 1,000, for just Office 365 or even other Microsoft services — you’re sure to find the right fit for your organization from the list here. There’s no reason to feel unsafe and unsecured at a time like this when Office 365 backup and recovery has reached a stage of great maturity. Go right ahead and back up your Office 365 data for peace of mind.
Featured image: Pixabay
This list is not comprehensive. Leaving out the industry giant CommVault (which offers two products: both the on-premise CommVault option and their cloud-based Metallic offering) is a big oversight. Including Code Two seems to be a stretch of the requirement here.
And Cohesity.
Off the (now list of 10) which is best, which is a better fit for SMBs, and what is the best value?
What backup solution do you recommend for 1 user? No problem with OneDrive as this can be done manually or with products such as iDrive and Backblaze. Backing up Outlook info is what would be handy for me.
The choice, as always, is subjective, but reflects the realities of the market at that time. Now a lot has changed and it would be worth doing some new research on new products on the market, such as the one mentioned by Georg Metallic or KODO for Cloud from Storware. We are waiting for an update.